The Flood-Tide

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  Jemima was still hesitating when Charlotte gave again that strange, muted moan. It was a sound of pain and fear, such as an animal might make, and it convinced her.

  ‘Let her stay in bed, and send for the apothecary,' she said.

  Charlotte was sick again before the apothecary arrived, and her temperature was certainly up. The apothecary examined her, and shook his head. He could not say what was wrong. Certainly her head hurt her, and the light hurt her eyes, but he did not know what was the cause of either. He prescribed aperient medicine and a febrifuge, and when he had gone, Alison snorted her derision and made up her own doses, though it was hard to get Charlotte to take them, for she was unwilling to uncurl herself, or to speak, or open her eyes.

  By the following day it was clear that she was in pain. She twitched and moaned with it, her hands plucking at the covers, her legs moving restlessly, drawing up and then straightening with a spasmodic jerk. The pain seemed to come and go, sometimes making her grimace with a sudden stab. The light hurt her, and loud noses made her jump and cry out. Alison's face looked suddenly old, as she advised sending for the surgeon from York.

  ‘You think it's serious then?' Jemima asked, and Alison nodded.

  ‘Aye, mistress. I'm afraid.’

  The surgeon was with the child for a long time, and when he came out, Jemima knew from his face that it was bad. But Charlotte had always been strong, she thought; whatever it was, she'd get over it, big, strong, healthy Charlotte.

  ‘I think,' said the surgeon, 'that it is brain fever.’

  Jemima stared blankly at him. It meant nothing to her. Then she grasped at the word fever. There were all sorts of fevers, and most of them were easily shaken off.

  ‘What should we do? How could she have caught it?' she asked.

  ‘Your nurse says that she had inflammation of the ears after the measles,' the surgeon said. 'It has been my experience that the fever enters the brain most often through the ears or the nose. This sort of fever attacks children, hardly ever adults. I'm afraid it is usually fatal.’

  Jemima's brain did not take in the words. 'But what should we do? Can you give her anything? Should we bathe her head? She's a strong child, she has always been healthy. She'll make nothing of a fever.’

  The surgeon reached out and took her hand, and she flinched at his touch, as it ushered in understanding.

  ‘Lady Morland, you have not apprehended me. There is nothing I can do for her. I would be failing in my duty to you if I did not tell you that I have never known a child recover from this particular malady.’

  Jemima pulled her hand away, staring at him, and then shook her head. Not Charlotte. Charlotte won't die. It's William we were always afraid for. William's gone to sea - he's too young, and too frail for it, but he would go. Charlotte should have been the boy. She was always the strong one of the two.’

  The surgeon looked at her for a moment with pity, and then turned to Alison, to speak to her in a low voice, giving her what instructions there were. When he had gone, Alison came and took her mistress's arm comfortingly.

  ‘Surgeons don't know everything,' she said. 'We'll nurse our little miss, and she'll get better. That old black crow of a surgeon - well, I didn't like to be rude to him, but I nearly told him what I thought of him.’

  The next day, the pain continued to come and go, but instead of whimpering, Charlotte began to scream - a terrible, shrill, high cry, like that of a rabbit caught in a trap, repeated over and over with an almost machine-like regularity, while the pain lasted. In between she lay in silence, broken only by her rapid feverish breathing, her hands clutching the covers, her eyes tightly shut. Those who nursed her spoke only in whispers, for even a normal speaking voice made her jerk and moan, as if any sound were pain. Straw muffled the floor in the passage outside, and no noise was permitted anywhere near. Alison tried to feed her, broth or ewe's milk, but she would take nothing, and it seemed to distress her too much to make it worth persisting. Then the pain would return, and her head would arch back rigidly, her face distort, and the terrible crying begin again.

  Jemima begged the surgeon for something to give her, Allen demanded it, but he only shook his head.

  ‘Something for the pain, at least - poppy, or mandrake - or - or something! You can't let her suffer like that,' Jemima cried.

  ‘There is nothing that will be effective for the pain,' he tried to explain. 'The pain is inside her head. Even poppy would have no effect.’

  No matter how anyone told her, or even if she told herself, Jemima could not go on with her normal occupations, even though she knew there was nothing she could do to help Charlotte. She could only wander about the house, walk up and down outside the sickroom, look in during the quiet phases, bite her knuckles when the screaming came. She could not even pray. Father Ramsay exhorted her to place her burden in the hands of One who was stronger, but she was numbed with anxiety, and could not make her mind frame the words. Allen made at least a pretence of being busy, but he never went far from the house, or for very long, and often as she stood helplessly at the sickroom door she would find him behind her, and reach for his hand. At night they lay sleepless, holding each other, waiting through the silences for whatever would happen next.

  After two days of the crying, she became quiet. Jemima came to look at her, and found her lying utterly immobile, as if in a stupor.

  ‘Is she better?' she whispered. Alison looked at her with a kind of agony.

  ‘Oh mistress, I hope so. But I don't - I wish I could think—' She swallowed. 'You know how noises troubled her? Well this morning the maid dropped a spoon and it hit the table and - she didn't seem to hear. She doesn't seem to hear our voices. Oh mistress, I don't think she hears us at all.’

  Jemima turned her head slowly to look at her. Alison looked grey and old and tired. Did she look like that herself? 'Deaf?' she said. She looked back at Charlotte. The child's face was visibly thinner, shrunken almost; even the gorse-bush hair looked thin and limp. It hardly seemed like Charlotte at all. Jemima no longer thought she might suddenly open her eyes and smile and say she had been pretending all along. She could no longer imagine her getting up at all. It was as if Charlotte had gone away somewhere, leaving this shrunken stranger-child in her place, a changeling.

  Then as she looked, Charlotte slowly opened her eyes, and Jemima saw that the pupils were so hugely dilated that there was hardly any of the iris visible, just empty blackness, as expressionless as two gaping holes. It was horrible, and she moaned and then stuffed her knuckles in her mouth to stifle it. But Charlotte made no sign of having heard or seen. Slowly the lids lowered over the empty stare; the shallow breathing continued unchecked.

  She lay in a stupor all day, and then in the evening a convulsion took her, leaving the left side of her face twisted, as if drawn up into a ghastly wink and sneer. Under half-closed lids the left eye had rolled away upwards and inwards, so that only the white showed; the right eye was still wide and black and unseeing.

  ‘Better she should die,' Alison whispered now. ‘If Our Lord would take her, without making her suffer more—' But Jemima could not wish it, though she could find no strength to pray for recovery either. In a stupor of her own, she could only wait for the outcome, clinging to Allen for wordless comfort. He did not leave the house now, though he still managed to conduct some of his business.

  The next day the pain returned, and Charlotte began to scream again, arching her head back so fiercely that her body came up off the bed in an impossible bow. The paralysed side of her face wasted almost visibly, as if the flesh were wax and melting away, the left eye drawn up in a diabolical squint, the right open, black, staring and blind. Alison broke down, and wept, and prayed for her child's deliverance, called upon Our Lord and Our Lady not to torture the poor child any more, but to take her, take her quickly. Jemima gestured to Rachel to take her away and make her eat, and give her brandy. 'She has borne it all herself,' she said. 'Make her rest a little. There is nothing to be done here.
' When Alison was gone, weeping and protesting, Jemima found herself stronger, in some strange way, through the nurse's weakness. She sat by Charlotte's bed and bore her share of the watching and suffering, until the child lapsed again into a merciful stupor.

  Towards evening, Allen came to her there, sat beside her silently, and took her hand. Jemima turned and stroked his hand between hers, not looking at it, but knowing and remembering the shape of his fingers and palm, the strength and gentleness of it, the pleasure it had given her, the number of times she had held onto it for comfort.

  ‘She won't recover,' she said quietly. The hand moved in hers in reply. 'She was always my favourite - not to love best, perhaps, but to understand. I always thought she was the one most like me, and in some odd way most like you too. 1 can't think of this poor wreck as Charlotte. I can only think of her as she was - rough and untidy and happy, galloping on Sorrell with mud on her face. Just as if she was like that still, somewhere - somewhere out of reach. But not changed.'

  ‘It's a good way to think,' Allen said. 'Hold on to that.' She turned to look at him, her love for him flowing peacefully beneath her sorrow like a great tide that is not troubled or turned by the wrecked ship on the surface.

  ‘You don't think she will recover?'

  ‘No,' he said after a long while. They sat in silence, watching the shallow breathing of the stranger-child in thebed, waiting for time to release her. The candle burned lower, and at nine in the evening the breathing stopped.

  ‘No need now to send for more candles,' Jemima said in a voice so unlike her own that she wondered if she had said it. Allen took her in his arms, and she pressed her mouth against his neck, because her throat hurt her so much. 'I hope there will be horses in Heaven for her,' she said.

  *

  At the end of July the Ariadne sailed into New York harbour with her newest volunteer, William Morland, almost hanging off the bowsprit in his eagerness to see. After convoying the troopship to Boston, the Ariadne, being the fastest vessel in the West India fleet, had been taking messages from one outpost to another, and William, who until April had never been more than ten miles from home, had now been to Boston, New York, Savannah and Kingston, Jamaica. Yet though he had already seen New York and it was his watch below, he was on deck gawping like a yokel.

  A shouted order to shorten sail and a clatter of bare horny feet on the deck planking made him crouch further out of the way as the foretop men rushed for the rigging, and he felt his hands and feet twitch in sympathy, for the foretop was his station on watch. His four months at sea, when he tried to look back on them, were a crowded blur. They had sailed from Spithead on the day after he had come on board, when he was still unable to tell which direction he was facing when below decks. This ship had seemed huge and maze-like to him, at once vast and crowded, stuffed to bursting with strange and strong-smelling men who spoke an incomprehensible language, and threw orders at him that he could not understand but must obey instantly.

  To add to his feelings of dislocation, he became violently seasick as soon as they cleared the shelter of the Isle of Wight, and remained so for three days. As a volunteer seaman, he swung his hammock with the rest of his watch.

  Twenty-four inches a man was allowed, and the hammocks swung in three tiers, so that William in the middle tier was nose to back with the man above him and the man below him. Lying tortured with sickness in almost complete darkness, his lungs stifled with the thick air, smelling of unwashed bodies and bilge, he struggled to come to terms with the continuous noise. At home there was always silence between and underneath the immediate sounds; here, there was ever and for ever the creaking and groaning of the timbers, and the shrill singing of the wind in the rigging, transmitted through the fabric of the ship, so that even on the lowest deck, below the water line, the all-important wind was a presence.

  The confusion, the perpetual noise, and the large number of strangers at too-close quarters compounded with his seasickness to make those first days seem like a long and terrible nightmare from which he had the impression of waking one day to discover that he knew where he was, that he could stand upright, and that his stomach was promising to deal justly with whatever he next put into it. From that day he did not look back. It seemed, in the foreshortening of his memory, that he had woken that first clear day knowing everything. He no longer had to pause and think to know port from starboard; he could patter his way with confidence from foretop royals to cable tier, and could make his way along the lower gun deck in darkness without stumbling. His mind adjusted quite naturally to taking night and day in four-hour bites, and his body to living on salt meat, hard bread, pease pudding, and musty water. The cacophony of ship noise sank into the background so that he no longer heard it, until it stopped, when he would miss it like a loved voice.

  Sailing into New York harbour, he thought back to their first visit there, and his first trip on shore, when he had attended Captain Thomas on his official business. He remembered his astonishment and confusion as he stepped on solid ground and found himself unable to walk, how the ungrateful cobbles had thrown him about and refused to bear him, how Captain Thomas had stood hands on hips and roared with laughter.

  ‘Now you're a real seaman, my boy!' he had crowed, and William had begun to grin unwillingly. Later, when they had gone back on board, he remembered those words and was proud. For one thing emerged clearly to him: that he loved the life. With all its privations and discomforts and its thousand perils, it was for him. He remembered the day that they had been thrashing along with the trade wind, making for Jamaica, a day of high, pellucid sky veined with silver mare's-tails. The sea was a deep, impossible blue, the foam breaking under Ariadne's bows dazzling white. The snowy deck beneath his feet was warm from the sun, and above him piled tower on tower of canvas, and he smelled the clean wind and heard consciously for the first time the symphony of wind and water. Then the knowledge had come over him with a rapturous certainty, like the moment of falling in love: he was a sailor; it was in his blood and he would never again be happy away from the sea.

  There were other vessels in the harbour, amongst them the flagship, but the sight of them did not thrill William so much as the fact that Captain Thomas had promised him his warrant as soon as they made New York: he was to be Mr Midshipman Morland. The Ariadne made her number and dropped anchor; the chain went rattling and thudding out from under her bows; she turned, snubbed, tugged a little like a horse finding herself tethered, and then was still. Almost simultaneously came the sound of the ship's boat hitting the water, going off to the flagship, and the cry from the lookout that a boat was coming off to them from the shore with a visitor. Ten minutes later Captain Thomas was in his cabin giving a hearty embrace to his brother-in-law Charles.

  ‘My dear Charles! How wonderful to see you. I did not expect to see anyone from home for many more months yet.'

  ‘I'm waiting for a passage to Yorktown,' Charles said.

  ‘I could hardly believe my luck when I heard the docksiders singing out that it was Ariadne coming in. It amazes me how those men can tell one ship from another, just from a glimpse of its sails on the horizon.'

  ‘In the same way that a shepherd can tell his sheep, or you, my dear Charles, can tell one orchid from another,' Thomas smiled. 'Practice. So you are on your way to Maryland, to our cousins?’

  Charles explained Allen's scheme. 'It is like his kindness to find me a way to come back here. He knew how worried I was.’

  Thomas shook his head gravely. 'Things don't look too good,' he agreed. 'I wish more of those back home understood the dangers.'

  ‘Yes, it was a bad thing when Parliament rejected the conciliatory Bill.'

  ‘I don't think the Bill would have changed things much. It might have delayed the troubles, but there are certain elements over here, hotheads and troublemakers, who would never settle for any terms. They want war.’

  They talked over the situation, for Charles, having only recently arrived in America, had news to catch
up on. The second Continental Congress had met and had determined on rebellion. There had been an incident at Concord near Boston in April, when General Gage had sent men to seize a store of powder being held by 'Patriots', as the rebels called themselves, and shots had been fired and the first blood shed. The Continental Congress regarded this incident as a declaration of war, and had proclaimed the need to defend the colonies against the British army, demanded a Patriot army of twenty thousand men, and appointed as their commander-in-chief a man called Washington, a wealthy landowner from Virginia who had been a major in the Virginia Militia.

  ‘They've already taken some of our forts,' Thomas told Charles, 'and talked about establishing a navy. The trouble is that our generals are hampered by their orders. The King and Parliament don't want bloodshed because of the bad feeling it would create once the rebels are subdued. They want order restored, but without the use of force. The whole business has completely unnerved General Gage. You heard about the incident at Breed's Hill? The Patriots established themselves on a hill overlooking Boston Harbour, which would have given Gage enormous trouble if they were allowed to fortify it. So he sent a force to take it - two or three thousand men I believe - and lost half of them. Trained soldiers against ordinary citizens! You can imagine how the rest of the army feels.'

  ‘But surely if the Patriots are only an unruly element the loyal citizens will resist them?' Charles said.

  ‘The trouble is that the unruly element is drawn from the influential section. Those who are debarred from government in the colonies - religious minorities, those without property qualifications and so on - seem to have remained loyal, I suppose thinking they have more chance of protection under British rule. But they have no power or influence. The rich landowners and merchants are the ones who matter, and they are the very ones who make up the Patriot Party.’

  There was a moment or two of gloomy silence, and then Thomas said, 'But tell me news of home! Have you any letters for me? How is Flora, and the baby?'